How to determine CPU wear from a photo

[plaidfro]

I am interested in picking up a socket 370 CPU. There are plenty of Pentium III and Celeron CPUs floating around for cheap. I am looking for anything in the 800Mhz - 1Gig range.

Seeing a bunch of these off ebay, how can you determine the wear on a CPU from a photo? What should I look for? Most say that they were pulled from a working computer. I will check the Hot Deals forum here to see if there are any also.

 

[phaxmohdem]

Uh, you're kinda SOL there. The obvious things to look for are:

- Scratches on the die surface, or the green part: (these are ussually bad, caused by morons armed with heatsinks/fans/screwdrivers

- Scorching (burned look) around die area on bottom of chip: Should be selling it as working in the first place. You can guess what probably happened here

The tough thing to figure out is whether or not the owner was an overclocker, in which case it is impossible to tell from a pic ussually, what kind of internal damage has been done via overvolting, heat etc. In general I think you are pretty safe.

One thing to look for is a yellow cloth like thermal pad residue on the CPU die. This is generally indicative that the CPU was used in a Dell system, (or some other name brand systems) which don't get overclocked very often.

 

[phaxmohdem]

Also, I've got 5 or 6 Working 1 Ghz (Matched steppings) PIII Socket 370 CPU's sitting around I'd be willing to part with, let me know if you are interested. I pulled them out of Dell optiplex machines.